In the spring of '87, I was a freshman at Salisbury State, a small college on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It was March and my brother was set to get married to his college sweetheart (on his birthday no less) in Pennsylvania.
I was living off-campus with my roommate Crazy Marty, playing rugby and barely going to class. These were the days before cell phones and emails so I didn't find out about my brother's bachelor party until the last minute.
I had missed my opportunity to catch a ride back home with some of the kids I knew who often made the 3-and-a-half hour trip. They call campuses like these suitcase colleges because a majority of the students went home on the weekends.
So I was sitting around with my rugby friends lamenting the fact that I was going to have to miss my brother's bachelor party when one of them chimed in, "why don't you hitchhike?"
He went on to explain that it pretty much was a straight shot down US 50 with not much in between. They convinced me without a doubt that it would be easy to score a ride. All I had to do was get a ride from Crazy Marty to the liquor store on the outskirts of town and find a eastbound traveler.
I managed to land one pretty quickly and the guy happened to be from my home town... but he was only going as far as Cambridge. Depending how you look at it, this could have been a crucial mistake because now I was farther away from school and in a town few stop at on the way out. I set up camp in front of a store with my duffel bag and waited.
And waited.
Bored of waiting, I figured I would just start walking and eventually I would find a ride. So I crossed the bridge and started walking. My logic was that with each step I would only get closer to my goal; sitting on the side of the road seemed like a waste of time. That was until I walked for about two hours with my thumb out and didn't have much luck.
It was then, looking out at the vast nowhere in front of - and behind me - that I started to curse my friends for what now appeared to the most ridiculous of all ideas. Out there on the open road, I had a lot of ideas to ponder.
And that's when a car pulled off the side of the road in front of me. I saw the reverse lights come on and I knew I had a ride.
He told me he was headed to Pennsylvania and that he figured he needed some company for the long ride. He had recently been divorced and had come down to visit his brother in Ocean City. His brother, so he claimed, was a major drug dealer at the beach and he'd done partied enough and decided it was time to head back home.
There was some general talk of drugs and cops and other hazards of his brother's occupation. As we spoke he reached into some sort of olive green army bag and scooped out a handful of bullets, waved them in front of my face and said, "Nobody is going to fuck with me."
"Fuck me," I thought.
Always one to face the most darkest times with the most driest humor, I bellowed out, "Now why would you need those?"
It was then that he reached under the driver's seat and pulled out a mayo jar full of a white powdery substance.
"Because I've got all this blow I need to unload," he said.
Great, here I am in a primer grey Ford Pinto station wagon with some guy tweaked out on blow who appears to be packing heat. He's got loose lips and a few hours to kill on a drive and I became his guinea pig passenger. I blew through my arsenal of stories about rugby hi jinx fairly quickly and had to labor through him endlessly bitching about his ex-wife and all the hot coke sluts he banged back at the beach.
"I'm not lookin' for a relationship right now, just lookin' for some fun youknowwhatImean?" he said while elbowing my rib cage.
Caught up in conversation - and wanting to avoid any possible confrontation - I didn't have the heart to speak up when we came to the DC/Baltimore split. About twenty miles later when he noticed a sign for Baltimore he recalled that I had originally stated DC as my destination. He offered to turn around but I insisted Baltimore was okay. My sister lived there after all so I was going to have to just roll with the plan.
When we got to Baltimore, he thanked me for the conversation and I thanked him for the ride.
There I was standing on the edge of the Inner Harbor looking for a pay phone with my head up my ass.
I rang up my sister and explained the situation.
Living in the city, she didn't have a car but her boyfriend did and she'd have him come get me. Once again I decided to split the distance and started to walk towards my sister's place on Calvert Street. But at some point I got disoriented and switched streets. It didn't help that I had only met my sister's boyfriend once and wasn't sure who to look for. Suffice it to say I ended up walking most of the way before I got the smarts to call from a pay phone and give the cross streets on the corner I was at to him.
He was an English teacher and Dead Head and the cool guy whose class everybody probably wanted to take. Intrigued by my adventure, he was eager to hear my tale. He was a Dead Head after all and had traveled all over the country following that band. There was a deli below my sister's place and he bought me a sub and a pitcher of beer. I flipped through the pages of the City Paper while I told him my ordeal and that's when I noticed an ad for the Descendents playing that night at the now legendary punk rock dump the Marble Bar.
"You know what would make this day even crazier?" I said to him. "If I went to this show."
No doubt he could relate. So he promised me he would drop me off there. My sister was planning on going to Mexico for her law school spring break the next day so she asked I not come home real late. Her boyfriend also volunteered to drive me back home the next day to get to my brother's bachelor party.
So he dropped me off and there I was sitting at a punk club about to watch one of my favorite bands when all of the sudden these skater kids I knew from Salisbury show up. They had driven up from school to see the show and we going to drive back afterwards. People did shit like this for punk rock back then.
When the show was over I asked the skater kids if they could give me ride up the road to my sister's and they said sure but on the way we past Loyola and feeling like I wanted to continue down this Kerouacian road to nowhere that I was on, I had them stop and let me out there. One of my best friends from high school went to Loyola and I knew he'd hook me up with a place to stay so I ran up the hill to campus and made a bee line for his dorm.
But the dorm door wouldn't open.
And the place was like a ghost town.
I asked a security guard what was going on and he said, "spring break."
Fuck me.
At this point, it was too late to call my sister so I did what I had done all day: I walked.
I walked for hours and miles before finding my way to my sister's place. The kicker was that it was just after 4am and she wasn't going to get up until 6am. So I attempted to sleep on a bus stop bench, then made my way into the alley behind her building and propped myself up against the wall. I didn't really sleep much so I decided I'd go back to the bench - at least from there I could see a clock on a building - a clock I would watch until I saw the light come on from my sister's room.
I waited about a half hour before I buzzed her to let me in, then immediately passed out on her couch.
After my mid-morning nap, because that's really what it was, I got my ride home and by night's end was at some house with a bunch of dudes watching blue movies and drinking beer. At some point we made our way into DC to go to a strip bar.
I have no idea how I got back to school.
I think my oldest brother Jimmy gave me a ride back...
My fellow dad Chag over at Cynical Dad dot com asked me to step in and deejay for him this week. Click on the header for a link to his fine site.
Chag has been ending his posts for-EVER with some sort of YouTube clip and this weekend I had the pleasure of the musical invite.
It was kinda hard - I must confess - to narrow it down to five because my head was a-twitter with the possiblities of being able to warp his readers minds with crazy shit. Suffice it to say there's no Buttholes Surfers, Clockcleaner or even the Chest Pains.
I kept it relatively tame and did some sort of biographical look back on bands that passed through my radar while growing up. Still this was tough, because there's been many and - honestly - even I'm a bit confused by some of my choices.
One pick was The Obsessed, a metal band from back in the days when I was dabbling in hesherism and skateboard punk as a wee lad in Aspen Hill. They were the guys who wore ammo belts and had cut-off jean jackets with patches and smelled like cheap weed.
The Obsessed crossed-over as it were playing for both punk and metal bands. I once saw them play with Iron Cross and Government Issue at a rec center in Wheaton, Maryland.
Wheaton, Maryland, folks!!
And I had my dad drop me off too because I was in like 9th grade and couldn't get my driver's license until I passed chemistry. A feat I still don't know how I accomplished!
Anyway, thinking about The Obsessed dredged up some fine memories... and also some downright scary ones.
Case in point:
During the end of my tenure living in Los Angeles, I had stumbled upon a weekly paper listing that The Obsessed were going to play. The band had broken up and reformed a couple of times and now it appeared they had signed to a major label. The time being what it was back then (punk had already "broke" as they say), the band was scheduled to appear to play in some seedy joint called Dragonfly that ultimately would give them some sort of hipster stamp of approval. I had previously seen Shudder To Think and Everclear there.
So I set out to go check out the band - solo - as I had done so many times before because I was a music geek who would go to the far reaches of the earth to see a band most had never heard of nor wanted to hear of in their lifetime.
Thing was, the flyer I had gave me the wrong information. Instead of the 6500 block of Santa Monica Blvd., it had the 6100 block of Santa Monica Blvd., which for the uninitiated (at least at the time) was boys town - the hot block for male prostitution. So I found the address - according to the flyer - and parked on some side street in a not-very-well-lit place. I felt something was amiss because I didn't see any long hairs milling about but then I convinced myself that I was just one hip motherfucker who knew about a band nobody else knew about. Ha-hah!
Crossing the street to get to said bar I was harassed by some Latino gang members who were loitering outside a liquor store.
Okay, that was uncomfortable but I was on a mission.
Again, I had this slight feeling that I was in the wrong place but couldn't rightly feel confident enought that I was, so I soldiered on. But then I got to the address on the flyer and there was indeed a bar and the door was open but it surely didn't look like the Dragonfly I had been inside before, so I made a mental note and decided that my hunch that the flyer's address was wrong was indeed true. I figured I'd just go back to my car and drive a few more blocks down the boulevard and find the right place.
I was standing on the corner waiting for traffic to pass when a tricked-out Lincoln Continental pulled up to the curb, curb-feelers scraping cement so much so that I had to step back. The electronic window on the passenger side slide down and as I bent down to look in a German(?) voice came from within.
"You vant a ride?" said the faceless figure.
Puzzled, I looked down again into the window.
"Comez zit in my car," said the voice and I saw a pale white hand pat the passenger seat.
And then it hit me that this dude thought I was some trick, some Private Idaho runaway junkie looking to score.
Flustered and confused I shot back, "I'm just trying to cross the street," I said.
"Vhat about vhen you cross?" said the voice.
"Fuck off," I said.
Then I ran into the darkness, got into my car and drove home as quickly as I could. I stopped closer to my Los Feliz crib and bought a 40 ouncer.
Once home, I locked our front door and sat on the couch drinking that bottle as fast as I could.
"We got to get out of this town," I said to my future wife.
So despite having been diagnosed early Friday with a hernia that would require surgery, I soldiered on and played a show with my band Chest Pains at the three-day festival in Winston-Salem, NC, known as Heavy Rebel Weekend.
It would have been a crime to have to cancel it and I'm glad doc gave me the thumbs up saying that it was okay (although doc didn't have any idea what kind of music my band plays or how hernia-inducing my singing, er, hollering can be).
One thing I had on my side was the prescence of a honest-to-God real soundman with a topnotch PA. Had the show been at some house with a shitty PA (or worse yet none) or one of the seedier local clubs we've been known to play, I myself would have pulled the plug.
But I felt it was my duty.
And it went smoother than I could have possibly imagined, not just the fact that it was easier to play through a real PA, but the fact that we managed to turn some heads in a sea of psychobilly, twang stomp and Cramps-meets-Bow Wow Wow garage pop.
So one of the ticks I pulled off my body a few weeks ago left me with a souvenir.
It's called Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness and pretty much mimics Lyme disease.
Of course I could possibly have Lyme disease but all my symptoms didn't match up, so they put me on some antibiotics and told me to just "keep an eye out" for any Lyme diseases symptoms like muscle and joint pain, fever and extreme headaches.
This sucks on many levels:
a.) You shouldn't drink alcohol while taking antibiotics (which I have to take for the next 21 days). In the next 21 days there's a pre-Fourth of July cookout, a Fourth of July cookout, my band plays a show at Heavy Rebel weekend in Winston-Salem and another in Raleigh at Sadlacks with our guitar player's friends' band from Wisconsin called Shady Haze. Bands from Wisconsin like to drink beer. Punk rock without beer sucks.
b.) One should not have prolonged exposure to the sun while taking antibiotics because you are more prone to getting sunburned. Taking my boys to the pool is one of the ways I keep myself sane during the summer months.
We’re forced to make them all the time. Sometimes we make good choices; sometimes we make bad choices.
On Memorial Day Weekend 2003, I found myself at the crossroads of decisions: Do I go see Black Taj – an offshoot band of long-defunct local indie rock heroes Polvo – at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro? Or do I go home after my catering shift to my nine-months-pregnant and about to pop wife?
I opted to go to the Cat’s Cradle after I got off my shift – working a wedding reception – and check out some music. I figured I’d be tethered to the homestead for at least a month after the baby came, so I hedged my bets that night that it wouldn’t be the night my wife would give birth and went to the show.
Fueled by a Poison Idea/Battalion of Saints cassette tape I found wedged between the driver seat and passenger seat of my charcoal grey ’93 Ford Ranger truck. The same truck I bought at Sunrise Ford in Tujunga, Calif., a decade ago. Not that the tape had been there that long. Nope. But it had been there since Darkest Hour guitarist Mike Schleibaum named-dropped Oi Polloi during a recent interview I conducted with the band to write about their upcoming local performance in the area. “We played with them in Europe,” he said. “They’ve had over a hundred members in the band.” This confirmed my suspicions as to it if was the same Oi Polloi from back in the day that I was thinking off. “They did a song about THC!” he said.
I spent several hours after that interview digging through a box of old cassettes looking for my Oi Polloi tape. Never did find it. But I found the Battalions tape – including live tracks no less – as well as a couple of old classic punk rock compilations like the Pushead-designed Cleansing The Bacteria and Welcome to 1984 both of which contained some of the best foreign hardcore my ears had ever heard.
I think I bought the truck from the salesman because I knew him as the guy who always had the blow or because my wife and his wife played together in the Montrose pool league. Or was it because he was the husband of the wife who played pool with mine and had a passion for cross-dressing and snorting coke? Yeah, that’s what it was.
*
The Midnight Evils vaguely remind me of Poison Idea and the Evils were Estrus Records’ label mates with Raleigh’s Cherry Valence (who were openers for Black Taj). Seeing Cherry Valence is one thing in its own right, but seeing the band with the likes of their label mates – Fireballs of Freedom, Federation X, Gasoline, or the aforementioned Midnight Evils – is quite another story because each band is looking to up the ante. Nobody wants to play last. Not that the Midnight Evils were playing on that fateful night. No, it would be an entirely different band from the indie rock cognoscenti.
Steve Popson, the former bassist of Polvo and part owner of Raleigh’s Kings Barcade nightclub, along with former Polvo band mate Dave Brylawski (Polvo being part of the Holy Triumphant of local bands that included Superchunk and Archers of Loaf all whom helped make Chapel Hill the indie rock Mecca it is today) debuted their new band Black Taj – with opening acts the Dynamite Brothers and Cherry Valence – in Chapel Hill. They had made their so-called “hometown” debut in Raleigh a few months before and now it was time to make the twenty-five mile trek east across Interstate 40 to wow the jaded hipsters of Chapel Hill.
I went to the club, got there early I might add (early in the sense that you never know when bands are going to start playing, regardless of venue), and pondered the facts of life as I drank a perspiring High Life: A stay-at-home dad by day and freelance music journalist by trade, I was just ten days away from the birth of my second child and feeling the mounting pressure that accompanies such a situation.
As a punk rock dad, I spend the majority of my days hanging out at the park with my three-year-old son Spencer, watching him pedal around on his mini-BMX bike with training wheels. Rainy days are spent singing along to Turbonegro, Devo, or Thin Lizzy while I teach him how to throw the goat – that horned, fingers-in-the-air heavy metal sign. Two days a week I am relieved from my duties for a couple of hours while he attends a cooperative playschool.
I usually read, write, or listen to music during those early morning hours, when coffee adds the kick needed to a day jump-started around 5 a.m.
But with an infant, this all would change.
*
At the Cat’s Cradle, I ran into several friends who were excited to see me out on a Saturday night and even more excited for me to be out at a decent rock show knowing it could be months before I’m able to keep my eyes open past midnight. Black Taj played a rocky set - and by rocky I don’t mean “rawk,” but rather somewhat sloppy, like they needed to practice some more – of Hendrix-meets-Sonic Youth jams, long on wanking and short on lyrics. Brylawski’s between-song banter had slipped since his days of Polvo where he never seemed to be short of saying anything. I had grown tired and headed for the door. Once outside, I met two friends who tried to lure me to a local watering hole owned and operated by a former Merge Records’ employee (with prerequisite band-member bartenders). As much as I wanted to go, something inside of me made me say no. It could have been the lack of funds in my pocket, but that’s a poor excuse because I knew I could rally the troops for a few beers on the premise of celebrating the pending childbirth. Maybe it was the fact that my wife had left a message on my cell phone earlier in the evening saying, “Don’t worry, I’m not in labor… but you need to pick up some milk for Spencer.” Maybe it was the full moon, I’m not sure. But for whatever reason, I made the decision to go home.
And it’s a good goddamn thing I did. Roughly an hour and a half later at 1:30 a.m. – and just about the time I’d be considering leaving the bar before last call – my wife’s water broke. When the water breaks, it can mean only one thing: a child will be born soon.
Being responsible isn’t my best suit. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my day, and fortunately, having kids has allowed me to learn the ropes of acting responsibly. But it’s not an easy path to be traveled, especially when you look at what had happened in the past ten months since my wife and I first learned of her pregnancy. I lost my job as a music editor when the local weekly folded; I left my pregnant wife alone with our son for three days to take a trip to Los Angeles to see one of my childhood friends and attend his movie debut; we converted our carport into a guest room in anticipation of the new addition to the family (note to self: prenatal hormones and home improvement don’t go together); we were crippled by an ice storm that left us without power for several days; I came down with a raging case of sinusitis that led to a case of strep throat in the winter and bronchitis in the spring; I had the unfortunate occurrence of having an Amstel Light bottle explode in my face while bartending at a wedding reception, a shard of glass scratched my cornea.
On top of all this, I’d been on a serious Oblivians jag (Best of the Worst 93-97) and it’s various offshoots (Cool Jerks, Tearjerkers, Deadly Snakes, and Reigning Sound), which could have been a good primer for a full-scale alcohol and drug-induced fall out.
But that didn’t happen. Well, I did revel in lucid dreams brought on by the codeine cough syrup prescribed for the chest congestion and the somnambulistic existence of life under two successive percocet prescriptions. Yet I managed to avoid any drunken encounters with the law, or my wife, and stayed relatively sober during one of the most tenuous moments of my life, the long days before the birth of your child, when your wife – wracked with discomfort – wants it over and done with; when she wants the fetus-turned-to-boy to get the fuck out of her.
*
Cole Burdick Barbera – my second son – was born on May 25, 2003, at approximately 2:37 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. It would take almost two weeks for his jaundice to fade and I can say there is nothing like illuminating your child with all the care of a pot plant.
A stack of music had accumulated in the meantime and I had been eager to tackle it. There was Betty Blowtorch, a posthumous disc of raunch and roll featuring former members of Hollywood noise-punk outfit Butt Trumpet which brought back visions of my life in Los Angeles, of living in Glendale and going out to see shows in Hollywood. I was reminded of the time I went to see Clawhammer at Raji’s only to find out that the prime parking spot I had scored in front of the club wasn’t so prime. My car was towed from a “temporary no parking spot” for a night time film shoot. There were things I needed to learn if I was going to stay in this concrete jungle like where and when to park and how not to go to the police department’s impound lot at 3 a.m. pissed off and drunk.
I was reminded of the days before marriage and before kids, and my have I come a long way.
* A version of this essay originally appeared on the zine Razorcake’s web site
“I quit the band,” he said. “You quit?” I said. “But you can’t quit.” “I quit dad,” said my 4-year-old son Spencer.
And then he left the room.
We had just launched into a skronk fest: He on mom’s trumpet, his 15-month-old brother on drums (or shall we say cymbal) and myself on bass.
As a stay-at-home-dad going on year four of my tour of duty, there are often times of the day when jam sessions occur. The instruments have always been lying about the homestead although I’m not quite sure how the band actually started.
Or why it stopped.
But I can tell you that it all pretty much began with Thin Lizzy. Before Spencer’s younger brother came along, I’d always force a trip to the record store when out running errands. If there’s one thing you learn when you become a parent, it’s that you have to steal back your personal time or it will quickly vanish in a haze of family duties. Oftentimes I’d duck into CD Alley on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill and browse. One day I bought Thin Lizzy’s classic Jailbreak. When we got back in the car, I slipped the disc into the CD player and off we went about the day’s business.
As the weeks passed, Spencer soon began to request Thin Lizzy. He loved the “Cowboy Song,” “The Boys Are Back In Town,” and “Emerald.” He would incessantly listen to this CD to the point where my wife wanted to ban it from the car. I quickly pointed out that it was better than listening to The Wiggles or Barney.
She agreed.
Once Jailbreak was worn out (with Spencer usually referring to the album-closer “Emerald” as the “fight the fight” song), on the next visit to the record store he asked if Thin Lizzy had any other records.
So I got him Black Rose (favorite songs: “Waiting For An Alibi,” “Get Out of Here”) and then Fighting (most requested: “Fighting”).
Before long his young, feeble mind couldn’t fathom the band pictures on the CDs and he yearned to see the men playing the songs he heard. So I bought him a DVD of Thin Lizzy live in Australia in 1978.
I think soon after watching that was when the family band started.
Sometime after the inaugural viewing Spencer started to strap on my guitar and began to mimic Gary Moore’s guitar licks. He’d stick the guitar pick in his mouth and clap his hands above his head to an imaginary crowd or jump up, spread his legs and then ape doing hammer-ons.
I quickly used his interest in music to capitalize on my own wanton needs. If Spencer liked listening to music and he liked watching music then that’s what we would do: There was Devo’s The Complete Truth About De-Evolution DVD. And Zeppelin. The Who’s The Kids Are Alright (which was a mistake because shortly after viewing Keith Moon play drums Spencer began to try an incorporate some of his more famous moves like playing with his feet or hitting the cymbals with his hands).
Not wanting to short change punk rock, I tossed in Black Flag live in Europe from 1948, Fugazi’s Instrument, Minor Threat live at DC Space, and even the first Turbonegro documentary. With songs about making pizzas, Spencer was instantly gratified by Turbonegro, although he wondered why they looked so creepy.
Devo won his over completely for the sole fact that I was able to explain that front man Mark Mothersbaugh was the guy “from Devo who does the theme song from Rocket Power.” Nickelodeon’s animated cartoon Rocket Power is set to a backdrop of skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding and features a zine-making junior high girl named Reggie and her shredding little brother Otto.
It appeared that my son was on his way to a life of rock’n’roll. At first, he flirted with the drums, then the guitar, and then back to the drums. The guitar was fun because I’d plug the axe into my shitty Peavey amp and turn it up. He’d pull the mic stand over and started making up songs. I quickly learned to keep my Fostex X-14 four-track within arm’s reach for just such circumstances. Back on drums, my wife taught him the basic intro to Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and again he was off and running in dreams of rock’n’roll grandeur.
Soon after, he discovered that other kids were into the rock. Like Rick Davis, son of local musician Ben Davis (formerly of Sleepytime Trio, Milemaker, Bats & Mice and now fronting Ben Davis and The Jets). Rick had a band and that band even had a name – The Take-A-Rides. Rick played his first gig at age four sandwiched between Bringerer and Merge Recording Artists’ The Rosebuds. According to Rick’s dad, he has since retired the name Take-A-Rides in favor of the Secret Sea Turtles. ‘He’s into heavy, slow music now,” explained Ben in an email.
The days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months and soon I was living out Jack Black fantasies of School Of Rock proportions, teaching Spencer how to throw the goat and how to wield a mic like Iggy Pop. One day before I headed off to practice with my band the Chest Pains, he asked me if we were ever going to play live.
“Like on stage,” he said. “Sure,” I replied. But won’t you get nervous?” he asked “Probably but that’s natural,” I said. “A lot of people get nervous – actors, athletes, musicians – before they perform,” I explained. “Well, when you get to practice tell your friends you know the world’s greatest drummer,” he said. “Who is that? Mom?” I said. “No, me dad!” he said.
When my wife came home from work that one fateful night – the night my son quit the family band – I told her I had bad news.
“What’s that?” she asked. “Spencer quit the family band,” I said. “Dad!” hollered Spencer when he overheard the news. “When I said ‘I quit’ I just meant that I was dome playing for the day,” he said wiggling his head and holding his hands up in the air flashing traces of the goombah I-talian bloodline he got my side of the family.
And so the band isn’t “officially” broken up yet, we’ll just call it on a hiatus.
*Versions of this essay appeared in Raleigh's The Hatchet and Australia's Monster Children
I have catered on and off for the better part of fifteen years.
